AQUAPHOBIAuses VR to connect inner psychological landscapes with exterior eco-systems. The work is inspired by psychological studies of the treatment of aqua phobia – fear of water- as an entry point to transform perceptions of our relationship to future water levels and climates. You follow a water microbe guiding you through five stages of a breakup story, mixed with references to five steps patients treated for fear of water go through, and five parts of a virtual replica of Louis Valentino Jr. Park and Pier in Redhook, Brooklyn, from subterranean mud tunnels to a bridge extending over future rising waters.

The virtual landscape combines red-clay materials with pre- urban plant species in Brooklyn and futuristic settings. The virtual landscape is developed from satellite images and soil and rock types Jakob Kudsk Steensen collected and photographed in his studio, later to be used as digital textures in the virtual world of AQUAPHOBIA. While journeying through the landscape, mud, water, subterranean infrastructures, roots and plants intertwine with one another to form a symbiotic landscape the person visiting the virtual simulation of AQUAPHOBIA experiences.

While travelling through the landscape, an alien morphing aquatic entity follows you around and emit scuba diving sounds and recites a poem, which tell a breakup story between the landscape and its virtual visitor. Ultimately, AQUAPHOBIA uses VR to mixes past and future geological periods, and the work personifies a landscape through a break-up story.

Narration in AQUAPHOBIA:

"After the breakup you compartmentalized our relationship beyond exhibitionist plastic glass, you stored images of us on a remote subterranean server. But I broke free. My microscopic wet materials spread like a virus, infiltrating the digital storage units you used to access us from. The wires are warm with me. We reset the power structure of our relationship. I gain control.

Direct your eyes downwards, further, towards your feet. You have sunken, about an inch into the mud. Wiggle your toes. Most of you is water. Feel the water in the mud, leaching through the permeable barrier of your shoes, towards your thin porous skin, sink further, my liquid enters the inner workings of your body's system.

I don’t understand why you insist on digging in our mutual past. We were many things but we never mutually exclusive. The items you threw out the window in anger of my promiscuous practices will continue to descend slowly, into my red clay mud. You think you are not of me but you are of me. On this peninsula always present, beneath the concrete you paved. You were never in charge.

The reality of my physical past, looks and configuration were always present, even though you attempted to hide them through what you call a cultivation processes. My cat tails, red clay, steam and humid were always, looming beneath your nose when we coexisted. Ours is a particular circumstance. Me, but submitting to you, was only an imagination, a virtual reality and fantasy of yours. We are not equals.

Learning the math behind my rhythmic behavior make you dance in excitement. Hop in. Head first. Learn the cadence of my movements, animate them, score them. Through the rhythm of my waves, we can learn to move in tandem. Together. Apart. Close your eyes and feel the mass of my droplets slide across body hair, over eyelids. Learn to swim."

Text by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, narrated by artist Rindon Johnson in AQUAPHOBIA. Support for the development of AQUAPHOBIA comes from The Danish Arts Council, Acute Art and NYC Office of Cultural Affairs.

Pando Endo

Pando Endo - Recording

Pando Endo2017Realtime simulation with 4 drone cameras. The video included here is the point of view of drone 1/4.

PANDO ENDO is a virtual organism simulated in real-time. It is a root system, a plant and an infrastructure. It was developed from phone photographs of aspen tree bark, moss and roots. These photographs were converted into digital textures, programmed to morph together with a procedural system that functions as a root system.

Four drones fitted with spotlights circulate the virtually simulated organism, examining it, zooming-in on its movements.

The organism has been tasked to breach virtual glass cabinets and taught to gauge and mobilise towards light sources. Textures crawl across its surface area and liquids trickle along its tentacles like clustered organic entities. Based on this programming, the root system has found its own navigation. It resists stationary exhibition to spread and traverse the vast empty space in the empty warehouse and exposition hall.

The organism takes its first name from the great Pando (Latin, “I spread”), a clonal colony of aspen trees estimated to be 80 000 years of age, resiliently surpassing the age of agriculture and the irreversible transformations of land masses by human interactions. The Pando has 40 000 trunks, weighs 6 million tons and spreads across 106 acres. Every tree is identical in DNA and connected to a single root system. As an organism, the Pando is a slowly moving creature capable of expanding our concepts of the natural, from vast open landscapes to the covert enormity of this individual living entity that is partly obscured underground.

Tasked with replicating a Midwest American forest for an artist collective, I developed the virtual PANDO ENDO after rambling extensively through the forest. In the humid air I came across a wet strong aspen tree, stretching from beneath the wooded floor towards the skies, looking like an alien creature from another planet with its wet bark and stark moss-covered colors.

I explored the clonal colony of aspen trees, which stretched across entire mountain areas. It has surpassed, in its age as a single living being, the entire history of human culture at civilizational scales. To substantiate an organism so enduringly resilient to the modern history of our own species, the Pando Endo’s intersection with the mountain-based artist collective seems like an eyeblink in its timeline. Could future human or ecological infrastructures evolve like the connected organisation of the aspen trees and exist outside current centralized systems?

"The World of Tomorrow as it appeared under the Snow of Yesterday"

From official press release:

In partnership with BRIC, Times Square Arts presents artist Jakob Steensen’s Terratic Animism on Times Square’s electronic billboards from 11:57 p.m. to midnight every night in November.

This project is a part of Midnight Moment, a presentation by The Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) and Times Square Arts.

Inspired by the 1939 The New York Times article “The World of Tomorrow as it appeared under the Snow of Yesterday” and its black-and-white photographs of the snow-covered exhibits from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Terratic Animism takes Times Square’s visitors on a digitally simulated journey through a futuristic wintry forest.

Jakob Steensen mixes realities, combining virtual recreations of a forest with screens showing recorded footage of Steensen’s performative explorations through derelict energy structures. The result blurs the boundaries of space and time, envisioning a future dystopian view of objects created to imagine a utopian future, displaying screens within screens, and putting viewers in the center of the forest as it surrounds them each night on the iconic electronic billboards of Times Square.

Jakob Steensen, Artist, said, “In my work I explore past and present imaginations of landscapes, so for the Midnight Moment I researched historical ecology and utopian-themed infrastructures in NYC. I am excited to present a special version of my project Terratic Animism that I made to convert Times Square into a virtual simulation of a futuristic winter forest, where structures from the utopian-themed World’s Fairs of the city's past are found and covered in snow.”

Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator at BRIC, said, “We’re thrilled that Terratic Animism, work that Jakob Kudsk Steensen developed while in residence at BRIC, will now be exhibited at such a grand scale where it will be seen by such a broad public. BRIC is proud to have contributed to the development of this piece of work.”

Debra Simon, Times Square Arts Director, said, “Terratic Animism takes viewers on a journey through a futuristic wintry forest and alters their experience of Times Square.”

Fred Rosenberg, President of the Times Square Advertising Coalition, and Harry Coghlan, Chairman of the Times Square Advertising Coalition, said,“The World’s Fair provided an outlet for visitors from around the world to showcase their cultures, so what better place to share a globally-inspired video than the Crossroads of the World. Jakob Steensen’s re-imagination of New York World’s Fair and New York City’s landscape will certainly immerse viewers and transport them from the concrete jungle to a dream-like winter wonderland."

The following digital screens are participating in the November Midnight Moment:

Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity. Generous support of Times Square Arts is provided by the. New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Visit http://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/index.aspx for more information. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @TSqArts.Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist based in NYC. Steensen is concerned with how technology influences how we perceive nature and imagine future landscapes. He develops interactive digital simulations and virtual reality pieces by combining satellite imagery with photographic 3D techniques, cartographic research and performances. Steensen often collaborates with climate oriented NGO’s, scientists and art residencies to develop his work. He has exhibited at Carnegie Museum of Art, BRIC, NY Media Center, The NY Moving Image Fair and at MAXXI in Rome.

His work has recently been featured in The Art Newspaper, Artnet, VICE, Hyperallergic, ARTREPORT and in Spike Art Quaterly. He has received awards and support from The Danish Arts Council, as well as from the residencies AADK, BRIC, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and Mana Contemporary. www.jakobsteensen.com

BRIC is the leading presenter of free cultural programming in Brooklyn, and one of the largest in New York City. They present and incubate work by artists and media-makers who reflect the diversity that surrounds us. BRIC programs reach hundreds of thousands of people each year.

In addition to making cultural programming genuinely accessible, BRIC is dedicated to providing substantial support to artists and media makers in their efforts to develop work and reach new audiences.

BRIC is unusual in both presenting exceptional cultural experiences and nurturing individual expression. This dual commitment enables us to most effectively reflect New York City’s innate cultural richness and diversity. Learn more at BRICartsmedia.org

Dome of Gated Ecologies

"Dome of Gated Ecologies" (2017)

VR, duration 3 minutesHTC Vive

Inspired by Amazon's current bio-dome offices under construction (link), I have developed a simulation in virtual reality that positions visitors inside a bio-dome located in a future desert landscape with gated communities. The rocks, palms, buildings and dirt have been developed from photographic textures and photogrammetry (A technique used to convert real-life objects into 3D models). In the scene, a TV screen display my own video recording of a horse that I found while exploring failed desert tourist infrastructures.

Kim Laughton, Alan Warburton, Rachel Rossin and I have been invited by DIS and Scatter to individually respond to the theme of "Styles and Customs of the 2020s". The result of this commission will be on display at The Hillman Initiative of photography at Canegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, opening March 16th.

"Debuting March 16 in CMOA’s Hall of Architecture, the VR experience takes users from a primeval cave setting, where wall paintings are animated by flickering firelight, and uncanny scenes in the not-too-distant future. Styles and Customs of the 2020s presents a digital dystopia inflected by rapid climate change, social unrest, and shifting global economics. The work was commissioned by the Hillman Photography Initiative, based on the prompt: How do new photographic technologies shape the virtual realm?"

Terratic Animism (Room-scale VR)

Terratic Animism is a virtual reality project, where people are free to roam around a digital winter forest that I created while artist in residence at MASS MoCA, 2016. My main source of inspiration at the time was a form of dystopian ecology zeitgeist, that I felt dominated popular science and media. Wearing a self-made costume made of mylar, I filmed myself exploring derelict infrastructures along a river leading through Green Mountain National forest. To make the work, I spent one month crawling through tunnels in derelict water plants, abandoned factories and an old rusty school bus. While exploring the landscape wearing my costume, I started to thinking about digital animation as a form of animism. I started to see virtual replicas of real world locations as primal practices we do as humans to develop sign systems we can use, in order to connect and merge with entire landscapes.

“The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism” – Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment, 1944

Text by writer and curator Angela Chan:

A silver shaman traverses the axis mundi of Terratic Animism’s romantic-Sci-Fi winter forest, draped in a protective future-ritualist’s “DIY survival shaman suit”, fabricated of NASA mylar, usb sticks, old threads and emergence LED lights. The shaman explores a frosted mountain landscape through rituals and journeys in search of lost animism in the crevices of the ice-glazed foliage amongst post-utopian infrastructures: Old nuclear sites, trashed school buses, 1800 water plants and frozen solar farms. Climate anxiety, escapism and nature ontologies from the past will intertwine with a sense of mystical futurism, as visitors follow the quest of the mylar-clad shaman’s symbiosis with the environment.

Projection mapping and a series of monitors plunge visitors into a virtual North American winter forest, dense with glimpses of pop-apocalyptic futures that overlap with residues of past romantic landscape imaginations. Under the canopy of the virtual sub-temperate trembling forest, multiple screens unearth Steensen’s own video recordings of a month-long exploration trip along a river leading through a mountain. Steensen filmed himself performing in the mylar shaman costume while artist in residence at MASS MoCA, 2016.

Terratic Animism excavates the concepts of shamanism from a chapter in The Dialectics of Enlightenment from 1944. On writing about media, Adorno contrasts mask-making and animism in shamanistic societies with the visual logic of the capitalist complex of media industries. Through the shaman’s performativity of vivid rituals and self-decoration of colorful masks, the consanguinity between humans and the environments they inhabit becomes securely established. This should be seen in contrast to how the production of consumer-orientated visual culture enslaves environments as a spectacle for the human eye to decipher, analyze, replicate and consume.

Taking Adorno’s commentary on animism as a historical source of inspiration, Jakob Kudsk Steensen challenges the continuum of rational pictorial conventions in digital media by insisting on the use of performance and abstract dimensions. Steensen’s critique of mass image production extends Terratic Animism to reveal the feelings of climate anxiety and the loss of a modernist utopian techno future. With animation as a tool for the assimilation of nature, Terratic Animism transmits how attempts of symbiosis with nature remains in a tentative position, existing here through the virtuality of visual technologies.

TREE VR (Art direction, level design and environmental art)

TREE VR

TREE VR is a project for NEW REALITY CO and The Rain forest Alliance. For the project I developed a virtual replica of an area in the Peruvian Rain forest suffering from deforest station, based on conversations with biologists who went on research excursions. The work won the Unreal Dev Grant and and the Lumiere Awards for best location based short animated VR.

As art director, lead environment artist and level designer, I planned the design in-game engine and made the virtual landscape, all video, composition, color and environmental effects.

Primal Tourism: Island (Room-scale VR)

Primal Tourism (2016) is a virtual reality art project, where tourism, science fiction, technology and speculations on future climates merge with escapism. The core of the project is an exact and full-scale virtual replica of the iconic tourist island Borabora in French Polynesia. The landscape is developed based on other people's imaginations and ways of looking at Bora Bora as an Island. The shape of the Island is based on satellite maps, have have been converted into the space of the landscape. Natural scientific illustrations of the region’s future water levels and ecosystems have been combined with native primal species from Bora Bora. On the Island are also a series of more narrative locations which are based on tourists photographs shared online, on reddit, as well as drawings of Bora Bora by Dutch explorers who went there on behalf of the Dutch East Indian Trading company during the 18th century. VR, climate speculations, tourism and a dream-like alluring form of landscape intertwine.

Primal Tourism: Island (VR preview)

Primal Tourism: Walk-through (Video)

Primal tourism: Walk-through (2016)

Primal Tourism: Walk-throughFormat: Video, 22 min, 41 sec. 4K/6K

The video seen here is a low res 1080p and it does not represent the quality used for exhibitions.

Primal Tourism(2016) is a virtual reality art project, where colonialism, tourism and science fiction intertwine with one another. The core of the project is an exact virtual replica of the iconic tourist island Borabora in French Polynesia, developed in a scale of 1:3. The landscape of the Island looks both primal and futuristic, as ancient eco-systems are contrasted with future and abandoned tourist resorts, and the camera shifts between movement patterns, which appear human, animal and drone-like. The work was developed over eight months by the artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen in the program Unreal Engine, one of the industry leading software for big industry computer game development today. This gives the work a polished and alluring look, while the landscape of the virtual Island includes abandoned tourist resorts. The creation of the virtual Island was based on actual satellite data and travel journals, which anonymous people have shared online on the forum Reddit. In addition, the logbook of Jacob Roggeveen, who ventured to the region on behalf of the East West Indian Trading company in 1722, has been a key source of inspiration for the artist.

Primal Tourism: Walk-through (2016), 22min. 41sec.Walk-through is a term used in online communities, where individuals record, comment on and share their methods for beating computer games and the routes they take through virtual worlds. Using this visual trope as an entry point, Jakob Kudsk Steensen has developed a video, where we follow an anonymous character exploring the future abandoned island of Borabora. The camera changes between mimicking human, animal and drone like movement patterns, and the commentaries of the protagonist combines references to colonialism, escapism, and tourism. Furthermore, several segments of the commentaries are based on Jakob Kudsk Steensens own observations, as he has explored several abandoned exotic infrastructures. Ultimately, Primal Tourism: Walk-through questions how ecology, technology and human fantasies influence one another.

Primal Tourism: Walkthrough, was installed as a 3 channel installation at BRIC, Brooklyn Arts and Media Center, through the month of March, 2017.

Chimera

”Chimera” (2016) Ink and acrylic on paper, 250x130 cm.

Chimera is the scientific term for an organism, which expresses simultaneously two different genes. An example is a human with eyes of two different colors. The mosquito in this drawing is a collage of different mosquito species put together. In the 20th and 21st centuries, mosquitos have mutated and developed themselves in directly correlation to human interactions in landscapes via. crops, genetic modifications and in the pursue of the eradication of diseases carried by mosquitos.

This drawing is part of the project Primal Tourism.

osquitos are not endemic to the Island of Bora Bora, and they do not currently exist in the entire region of French Polynesia. With Chimera, a human element is merged with the landscape.

"A Cartography of Fantasia is a 2-channel video installation that examines relationships between imagination, financial speculation, and the technologies our human species use to transform the ecology of this planet.

In the video, an alien like satellite guides you through the plant and animal species living at a post-apocalyptic and futuristic desert region, filled with abandoned tourist infrastructures such as airports and golf resorts. As such, questions of the influence of pop-cultural speculations on post-apocalyptic futures have informed the visual language of the work, which combines photographic realism with digital animations and special effects.

One screen shows footage recorded on location at abandoned tourist resorts and airports. In a few shots, this screen summarizes what each location feels like, and how they are constructed as artificial oases in the middle of deserts. The other screen documents the exact whereabouts of the two cameras used to film the work, by displaying their GPS coordinates in real time. In the lower left corner of the screen, a map displays the location of the camera from a satellite perspective.

By combining documentary ways of filming with digital animations and Google satellite recordings, the work explores how technology has influenced how we perceive nature. The work contrasts what humans imagined creating in a desert, with the unexpected landscape that has evolved from the abandoned sites created through financial speculation. "

A Cartography of Fantasia was filmed during a two-month residency at the art center AADK [Arkitektur der Aktuelle Kultur] in Murcia, Spain. During the filming period, I would sleep overnight at the abandoned tourist resorts (built between 2007-2011), to become fully immersed in the surroundings. The development of work was supported by the Danish Arts Council.

Utopian Tourism

In the 30 sec video, that loops in infinity, a man is seen from first person view, swimming towards the perfect imaginary desert palm tree island. Every time he reaches the island he dives, and when he comes up, he is again in deep water. It is made by "hacking" and re-modelling the computer game Farcry 3, which is a blockbuster tropical-violent first person shooter game.

Together with the video, postcards are shown. These are developed from my own exploration of abandoned tourist resorts. Using my own original documentation footage, combined with pop-cultural references to the first person experience culture of computer games and Google Maps, the post-cards function as meditation on forms of commercial, computerized, and satellite ways of looking at relationships between the self, the geological structure of the environment, and the technologies we use to interact with it today.